The case of the ‘Emergency Relocation Quotas’

What actually advances European policymaking in the field of
migration? Scientific evidence, political decisionmaking or civil society activism?

The Soho Hotel, housing 150 refugees mainly from Syria and Iraq, is one of two SolidarityNow buildings in Athens supported by UNHCR and funded by the EU. NurPhoto/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Southern European countries and more specifically Greece and
Italy have faced rising flows of asylum seekers and irregular migrants since
2013, and particularly during the 2015-2016 period.

Indeed no-one predicted the
dramatic escalation of irregular maritime arrivals during 2015, lasting till
March 2016 along the Turkey-Greece corridor, and to this day along the
Libya-Italy corridor. Major challenges that such arrivals bring to light
include the need for internal EU solidarity in sharing responsibility, the
‘burden’ of processing asylum seeking applications, and eventually of integrating
those admitted as refugees.

The Emergency Relocation Mechanism launched first in
May 2015 and further expanded in September 2015[1] has
played
an important role as an EU policy response, seeking to enforce the
more equitable sharing of responsibility
for asylum-seekers among member-states, and thereby taking some of the pressure
off the frontline states.

The plan foresaw 160,000 relocation
places in total, to be implemented over a two-year period (September 2015 to
September 2017), more specifically assigning 66,400 places to people to be
relocated from Greece and 39,000 from Italy to other EU countries.

Relocation is selective and applies only to those nationalities whose applications for international protection (refugee status or subsidiary protection) have over a 75 per cent
success rate on the basis of quarterly Eurostat data.

Thus, Syrians have steadily been
eligible for relocation while for instance Afghans, Iraqis or Eritreans have
moved over and under this threshold.

The 2015 challenge

In order to understand how the emergency relocation quotas
came about, one needs to consider the size of the flows reaching Greece via
Turkey and Italy via Libya in 2015.

During 2015, Greece received through its sea border with
Turkey over 800,000 people while the flows continued unabated during the first
three months of 2016 when a further 140,000 people crossed the narrow straits
that divide the Turkish coasts from the Greek islands in the Aegean sea. The top
countries of origin of irregular maritime arrivals to Greece were Syria, with
over 50% of the arrivals, Afghanistan (25%- 30%) and Iraq (nearly over 10% and
nearly 20% in recent months). These were populations clearly in need of
international protection.

In Italy, arrivals have been
rising since 2014 with over 150,000 in 2015, approximately 181,000 in 2016 and
nearly 60,000 already in the first half of 2017. The nationality composition differs
significantly compared to Greece with Nigerians, Eritreans, Sudanese, Somalis
and Gambians being among the five largest nationality groups. Among these
clearly Eritreans, Sudanese and Somalis are people fleeing violence and
persecution in their own country and hence the flows involve a high percentage
of asylum seekers.

The emergency relocation
scheme was both innovative in terms of asylum policy and ambitious in its
conception. It showed the strong political will on the part of the President of
the European Commission to enforce burden sharing. Naturally its implementation
was not free of challenges. Indeed the first implementation issues stemmed from
the actual pre-registration and processing of people upon first reception in
Greece and Italy. They included a certain reluctance on
the part of the destination member-states and the emergence of what has been
dubbed ‘shopping lists’ of people for relocation (for example, vulnerable
groups such as unaccompanied minors, single mothers, victims of trafficking, or
highly-educated persons).

Table 1: State of Play of Emergency Relocation Mechanism, 13
October 2017

The European Commission
has also described as problematic the inadequate or unjustified grounds for
rejecting relocation requests.[2]
However, the Greek Asylum Service, for instance, has explained how following up
on rejections of relocation is difficult, because of the relocation scheme’s
overall design, given that member-states’ sovereign right to refuse to relocate
asylum seekers cannot be challenged (AIRE, ECRE report).

Naturally the whole
issue has been further complicated by fears of terrorist infiltration of asylum
seekers, particularly from Syria.

Responding to the legal
action taken by Slovakia and Hungary, the Court of Justice of the European
Union has upheld that the emergency relocation quotas are in line with EU law.
While this decision is important at the political level, it probably did not do
much to change the implementation level where problems and delays have
persisted.[3]

As of 13
October 2017, there had been approximately 48,000 requests for relocation
lodged by Greece and Italy and just over 30,000 people were actually relocated
(see table 1 and 2).

Table 2: State of
Play of Emergency Relocation Mechanism, 28 Sep. 2017

Ιt is important to clarify that when it comes to Greece,
relocation is available only to people who entered Greece between 16 September
2015 and 19 March 2016. While this has been unpopular among people on the move
at first, it has since been reconsidered, as the alternative is to remain in
Greece with few prospects for employment.

Despite its implementation problems the emergency relocation
quotas have been an important policy innovation. They have
been a first step towards reconsidering the Dublin Regulation and the first
safe country principle.

They have introduced a
new way for direct sharing of responsibility for asylum-seeking among
member-states. While presented as an emergency solution, the quotas are likely
to become a more long-term, permanent mechanism in the impending reform of the
EU Asylum system, now that the main criteria – size of the country, GDP, and
number of refugees already present – have been established. This is finally
taking up suggestions from researchers that had actually been circulating for
at least two years.

Reaching
the ear of the European Commission

The question arises whether the relocation quotas emerged as
a result of evidence-based policy making and researcher-policymaker dialogue,
or whether they are the result of a political move taken in the heat of the
moment, under pressure from an unfolding crisis.

One might argue that all these elements combined. The idea
had been circulating among academic and policy circles about asylum seeker
relocation quotas. It was in November 2014 that Jesús Fernández-Huerta
Moraga and Hillel Rapoport presented a model for tradable refugee admission
quotas[4]
in a possible reform of the EU asylum policy while the same authors had also
elaborated a proposal on tradable immigration quotas[5].
Other authors had considered the issue of responsibility sharing and the
imbalances created by the Dublin system and the first safe country principle
since it found itself operating in an uneven implementation context[6].

However, the question arises whether such proposals reached as
far as European Commission headquarters because the Commission was looking for
scientific evidence on the best possible approach, or whether the emergency,
political will and perhaps civil society mobilisation was more instrumental in
this?

Indeed our answer rather favours the latter reasons over and
above the effects of scientific evidence. True, the European Commission
leadership was open to scientific evidence because of the situation on the
ground and the need to address it through radical and effective measures. But
the backing of the German political leadership in admitting refugees and showing
solidarity was also crucial to the decision. The emergence of a spontaneous transnational
civil solidarity movement not only in the frontline countries, Greece and
Italy, but also in Austria, Germany and other countries where local people
greeted asylum seekers at train stations offering food, clothes and hospitality
of course played an important part too.

In other words, the moment was
ripe and the political will was there.

‘Bad blood’

However, one also has to consider the downside of the emergency relocation quotas’ measure. Indeed the quotas,
as explained above, were strongly contested by Central Eastern European member
states and were almost forced upon them. This has created ‘bad blood’ for the
current and future Dublin reform negotiations where a permanent relocation
mechanism is a red flag for many of these countries.

Indeed the decision of the ECJ
marks an important development, but consensus needs to be built further around
this measure of direct asylum responsibility sharing. Naturally here an
important part can again be played by civil society and by experts who
circulate the idea, if they explain what it entails and continue to build
support for it.

Overall it is clear that
political leadership and political will are paramount for research findings and
proposals to be taken on board and transformed into policy solutions.

[1] Council
Decision (EU) 2015/1601 of 22 September 2015 establishing provisional measures
in the area of international protection for the benefit of Italy and Greece.

Anna Triandafyllidou directs the Cultural Pluralism
Research Area in the Global Governance Programme of the European University
Institute (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies), Florence, Italy. She is
the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies.
www.annatriandafyllidou.com

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